When comparing Pidgin vs IRSSI, the Slant community recommends Pidgin for most people. In the question“What are the best IRC clients for Windows?”Pidgin is ranked 4th while IRSSI is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Pidgin is:

Pidgin not only supports IRC, it also supports plenty of other services such as AIM, Google Talk, MSN, ICQ and plenty of others. This way, you can have all of your conversations in the same app and won't have to deal with multiple chat windows being open.

Pros

Pro

Support for a wide range of additional chat services

Pidgin not only supports IRC, it also supports plenty of other services such as AIM, Google Talk, MSN, ICQ and plenty of others. This way, you can have all of your conversations in the same app and won't have to deal with multiple chat windows being open.

Pro

Free and open source

Pidgin and its code is completely free and open source. Pidgin has no ads and no features behind a paywall.

Pro

Cross platform

The Pidgin instant messaging client is cross platform, working on Linux, Windows and OSX.

Pro

Convenient notification features

Like other quality IRC clients, Pidgin features notifications that the user can set in order to have a variety of things happen when the users is mentioned, such as an audio cue or changing the system tray icon.

Pro

Highly customisable with plugins

Pidgin not only has a large plugin library built-in, but also an array of third party plugins for a variety of functions.

Pro

Terminal-based

Pro

Perl Scripting

Allows the user to create and use perl scripts to perform actions.

Pro

Persistent Connection

Pro

Command line outputs can be sent to a channel or message

/exec -o figlet "Slant.co"

Pro

Themes

Allows the modification of IRSSI's look and feel.

Pro

Free and open-source

Pro

Has a plugin for encrypted communications

Ad

Cons

Con

No native VoIP support

While there are plugins there is no built in support for VoIP in Pidgin which is time consuming to implement instead of being baked in from the jump.

Con

Gives little direction upfront

Actually, Irssi.org has it's own GREAT documentation.

Con

Cryptic configuration files

Con

Can't do vertical splits

Untrue, there are perl scripts available to do split screens with

Con

No GUI

Actually a plus, lower memory overhead

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